Roundtable on Lytle Shaw's "Dutch Landscape" (original) (raw)

Hegel prized Dutch landscape painting not just for its "secularizing" maneuvers, but for its indexing of work, work which was a piece with the Low Countries's man-made topography: "What nature affords directly to other nations … [Hollanders] have had to acquire by hard struggles and bitter industry." Laborious constructions of space characterized the country and its aesthetics, with ever-churning processes of differentiation-sand from sea, Protestant from Catholic, idea from thing-for Hegel a pictorial drama generative of thought. It is the same regions' "transitory and fugitive material" that forms the recalcitrant terrain of Lytle Shaw's engrossing New Grounds for Dutch Landscape, a poetic revision of no less than two centuries of in-gazing art history. On the occasion of the book's publication, the Rail has commissioned exchanges with some of Shaw's interested readers. The book's central contention is remarkably simple: that artists like Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, and, above all, Jan van Goyen, did not so much show their native Republic as pictorially re-enact the unsteady geological circumstances of its existence. Dunes, polders, swamps, fens, and beaches were in constant flux. The provinces were forever flooding, the turf eroding, to set the country in shifting shapes of dampness. Van Goyen, for example-who Shaw notes painted wet-on wetwielded pigments of brown and tan to both describe and metaphorize Dutch sog. Jacob van Ruisdael, meanwhile, dramaturge of the rushing waterfall, refashioned sediment control as anxious scenery, rhyming "land management-drainage, reclamationwith pigment management." Shaw's connection here is no pat allegory. The entropic yearnings of the Dutch countryside index a surprising history (the early modern Dutch economy was itself collapsing when painterly experiments were at their height). What the book offers is a multi-epoch story that oozes and puddles creatively around both Northern matter and four hundred years of its beholding. This all renders the Dutch painters-as more than one of Shaw's interlocutors points out-poets of a type; but avowedly unpastoral ones. For these are landscapes possessible but forever fugitive; constructed and potentially dissolved, they are property and property's opposite; disquieted rather than consolatory: in Shaw's words, "almost nervous." For like the bourgeois economy of their making, the countless Dutch pictures actually allure by their hostility to easy inhabitation and with it, intimacy. It was Hölderlin, of all people (Hegel's seminary roommate from Tübingen) who knew this: "Wie schön aus heiterer/Ferne Glänzt einem das herrliche Bild/Der Landschaft" he wrote during late-life madness: "The landscape shines/cheerfully distant/Like an enchanting picture." Not quite an indifference greets us in old Dutch art, but a timely reminder that, once painted, nothing was more unsettled than "nature."